Computer shuts down during startup

Question

Hey everyone,
it shames me a little to ask for help about computers because I am usually ok with doing this stuff myself.
This time, however, I cannot seem to fix the problem indefinitely.I need a laptop for school and cannot afford another so any help would be greatly appreciated!:
I will just point the facts out:
After a few years use (two) it now shuts down during (windows) startup.
I ended up cleaning the Heatsink/fan yet the problem persisted.
The model is a Toshiba Satellite A200-PSAF6A.
I am no longer under warranty.
The school techs cannot help me.
A few oddities that I noticed:
It starts up fine when the power plug isn't plugged in.
It starts up fine with the power plugged in only in safe mode.
Using CCleaner and Defraggler temporarily fixed my problem (for about 5 minutes or so).
I hope that you guys can help me. It's just annoying that I cannot fix this myself..
If any further information is required please just ask and I will reply with as much haste as I can under my current circumstances.
Thanks,
Norak.

Answer 1

Linton wrote:
I have a couple of years old A200 satellite and have the same problem.
During a "cold start" I may get up to the windows login screen and then it shuts down and restarts. (sometimes it doesn't make it to the windows screen and turns off to restart). Then it will start to load windows and the little bar at the bottom will be loading windows and then freeze. I would have to hold the power button down to turn off and restart. Then I start windows normally and it usually works OK, sometimes I have to do this step again, but eventually I get into windows. Then if I shut down and restart it starts up fine, unless I wait for it to cool down.
Since this started happening, I have reinstalled vista 32bit to out of the box condition and updated to the latest bios, to no avail.
Computer has always run hot since new, seems to have very poor cooling. But the fan operates, most of the time on full boar.
Do you think this is a software issue or a component issue, or cold joint.
BTW it will not shutdown at all if I keep the computer in the F12 key settings area,im not sure what this place is called, but you choose to boot from cd here.
Okay, this is weird and I'm not sure if this has anything to do with what I had mentioned earlier. I was having some issues with my DVD drive, it was rattling bad and the spin off time was off causing coasters on almost every blank DVD, so I had the thing sent in for a replacement. They put in a new DVD drive, checked the status of my BIOS (V 4.2 which I had all along) and returned the unit back to me sometime around April 22, 2010 -- ever since the thing was working fine. I'm not sure if the bad drive had caused the unit to work erratically.
Before it was sent in, the issue was of course with the DVD drive, the startup then shutdown problems, plus a whole plethora of other small problems which I didn't bother to mention on my first post. For instance; the illumination lights that controls the media -- sometimes they would not turn off when I shut my computer down. The light stays on even after the computer powers off and I'd have to unplug the AC power cord for the lights to completely shut off.
My initial problems with the laptop was:
Media lights won't go off,
DVD drive rattles very loudly and burns bad media,
Shutdowns during startups,
The screen housing would creak every time when I wanted to adjust the position (this happens when I adjust it slowly).
After they replaced the DVD drive, everything seems to work fine. It's been almost two months now and I haven't had issues with any of the above mentioned problems.
Satellite P305-S8997E | Windows7 Pro 64-bit | Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo T8100 2.16GHZ | 4GB DDR2 RAM | 320GB 5400RPM
Dell XPS 17 | corei7 andy Bridge | 8G DDR3 | 1TB x7200 | BD-RE | 1080P